778  College & Research Libraries July 2021

Libraries can serve as an essential guidebook that should be in every academic librarian’s col-
lection.—Megan Duffy, Syracuse University

Time in Maps: From the Age of Discovery to Our Digital Era. Kären Wigen and Caroline 
Winterer, eds. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 272p. Hardcover, $45.00 
(ISBN 978-0226718590).

“I thought you didn’t want to see another map again,” my partner 
joked as I held up the book I was sent to review. Indeed, that’s a 
sentiment I uttered more than a few times three years ago, when 
I graduated from library school and went on the job market after 
10 years of working in a university map collection and on several 
historical mapping projects. It was in these roles that I learned the 
nuances of digitization, visualization, and time-series data struc-
tures using geographic information systems (GIS) software. Over 
my time in the library, I became disillusioned with a number of 
trends not isolated to my workplace, including the fetishization of 
rare materials, the elision of labor, the detached overtheorization 
of “the archive,” and the extensive intellectual gatekeeping meant 

to exclude those seen as lacking the appropriate credentials and occupational categories to 
produce scholarship. Indeed, I thought I’d be the right person to take on Time in Maps: From 
the Age of Discovery to our Digital Era, given my expertise in the production, distribution, and 
access of (historical) maps. However, the book’s explorations break little new ground outside 
the domain of histories of cartography. The digital era promised in the book’s subtitle is not a 
point of arrival, as suggested, but an insistence that even more study into a format and genre 
that has seen considerable scholarly attention for centuries is needed, with minimal ethical 
engagement with the conditions of the production and reproduction of paper maps. 

The editors’ introduction lays out five premises for the book as a whole:
The production of self-consciously historical maps was a hallmark of the global early 

modern age.
“Static” maps accommodate time in surprisingly versatile ways.
Diversity [in cartographic styles] persists [across cultures].
All maps tell time.
Cartographic archives change how maps tell time. (5–8)
I was hoping these propositions would be taken up by individual authors and interro-

gated throughout the book. Instead, these premises are assumptions that the reader is told to 
carry into the text. If one shares these assumptions, one can reach the author’s conclusions. 
I was most interested in exposition of the fifth prompt. Alas, this initial gesture toward map 
libraries acknowledges the opportunities they enable for historians in the digital age but not 
the infrastructure or labor necessary for these opportunities. Despite acknowledgment of the 
various colonial projects in the early modern era that led to the creation and reproduction of the 
maps and atlases examined in the text, this lens is not directed to contemporary map archives 
and library special collections, as if they are separated from their antecedents in discrete times 
of “then” and “now.” As well, it is worth noting that the institutions praised for their online 
collections are top-tier, well-funded research libraries and that all of the authors are either ten-
ured professors at prestigious universities or directors of privately funded special collections.



Book Reviews  779

With the exception of William Rankin’s opening essay in the collection, used to narrow 
the analytical frame and focus of the remainder of the book on time in paper maps, I was most 
puzzled by only minimal inclusions from “our digital era” and the paucity of examples from 
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To Rankin, cartography is most compelling when a 
singular, bounded experience of history is effectively depicted through static visualizations, 
anchoring the development of a “time-memory” to be read with respect to place. “If anything, 
animations and slidebars seem to be inhibiting experimentation with otherwise common car-
tographic strategies,” he claims (26). Such a perspective diminishes the significant learning 
curve (and, frequently, astronomical costs) associated with geographic information systems 
software, and excludes many projects created with more user-friendly, web-based mapping 
utilities, through which many previously understudied spatial histories have been told.

Several historical maps published in the twenty-first century are included in the text, 
but their productions are, in general, not considered. Olga Vanegas’ map of Aztec settlement, 
which ostensibly builds upon the same Sigüenza maps Barbara Mundy places at the center of 
her chapter, is included merely to provide spatial orientation to the reader. Are these studies 
not in conversation with one another? (I nonetheless appreciated this chapter for providing a 
perspective on space-time missing from my Eurocentric geographic education.) As well, the 
beautiful 2008 visualization of geological time reproduced on the front cover of the book is 
only referenced in a single-sentence afterthought to a chapter on the earliest American maps 
of deep time accompanied by the claim that “[t]heir children are alive and well and living 
with us today, a recent illustration of geological time shows” (167). 

This is a book for science and technology historians and rare map enthusiasts, not for map 
or digital scholarship library workers interested in historical GIS. Indeed, even those coming 
to the study of maps via geography, not history, might find the limits of their interest tested 
by chapters dedicated to an examination of veils in map-adjacent illustrations and topological 
diagrams of linguistic concepts. By limiting the scope of the text to engagement with design 
strategies and their interpretation by map readers, this volume generally steers clear of po-
litical questions related to the selective inclusion and labeling of geographic features, as well 
as the human costs of colonial occupations and wars enabled by maps (with the exception of 
American soldiers memorialized through battlefield tourism in the final chapter). It also glosses 
over the work of surveyors and data collectors, instead chronicling the careers of individual 
cartographers. Though remote sensing and digital technologies enabled the automation of 
many mapping processes, cartography is not and has never been a solo practice. The focus 
on design also elides the massive apparatus of labor and technology that underlies not just 
the production of maps, but the systems that allow historians to study them now, through 
map libraries and archives. 

Returning to the framing chapter, Rankin states that the fields of “digital humanities and 
spatial history…[are] the source of the most vocal attacks on static maps” (25). Though I am 
well aware that humanities departments are under attack, I did not know that maps were as 
well. Though I may lack the academic pedigree of this volume’s authors, I trust my instincts 
and map library experience enough to contest this statement. Cartographic scholarship is 
alive and well within popular venues and specialized academic journals. Perhaps the authors 
framing this collection would feel less threatened (from positions of great power, no less) if 
they assumed a more generous position toward map scholars rooted in the digital era, instead 
of foreclosing the possibility of engagement.



780  College & Research Libraries July 2021

The fifth prompt from the introduction reads as a demand: “We expect these archives 
to be maintained so we can continue to do this work.” Perhaps this is a paranoid reading on 
my part, but those who work with maps and maintain archives are often accused of being 
“inaccessible” by historians (for reasons that range from copyright to COVID-19). We are also 
likely to have some of the most visceral understandings of time in maps. From the hundreds 
of “ordinary” sheet maps I georeferenced and visualized to enable groundbreaking studies 
of environmental history in Toronto and Los Angeles, to my reaction to the librarian who 
asked me if every sheet and edition of our 1:50,000 National Topographic System maps of 
Canada were individually catalogued, my understanding of time in static maps is nuanced, 
developed through my engagement with map users and maintainers instead of the mapmak-
ers of the distant past. Those of us who study place instead of genre are well aware of how 
time and space-memory accrete through editions, series, and the experience of using librar-
ies and archives to engage with history—all of these avenues for inquiry are excluded from 
this volume. I suppose it is unfortunate that one must click layers on and off for the fullest 
engagement with the places I have mapped, and that someone always removed my name 
from the datasets I created myself, but I appreciate that dynamic cartography allows for more 
complete histories to be shared.—Jordan Hale, University of Waterloo

Rebecca Tolley. A Trauma-Informed Approach to Library Services. Chicago, IL: ALA Editions, 
2020. 192p. Paperback, $59.00 (ISBN 978-0838919811).

As a deadly pandemic grips the world, this book couldn’t have 
come at a better time as we deal with a collective ongoing traumatic 
event. The trauma-informed approach (TIA) changes how we view 
ourselves, our organizations, and our patrons through centering 
empathy, compassion, and education about trauma along with its 
multitude of impacts on psychological, physical, and emotional 
well-being. TIA acknowledges that there are many contributing 
factors (known and unknown, micro to macro, historical to current, 
visible and invisible) that affect individuals, how they navigate and 
interact in the world, and how they engage in the services provided.

Written by Rebecca Tolley, A Trauma-Informed Approach to Li-
brary Services provides a rationale for adopting and implementing a 
trauma-informed framework in libraries that would “help us build 
empathy” for those we serve while “investing empathy in our opera-

tions and through our organizations.” This book aims to increase awareness of and advocate 
for an approach that aids the individual in a library organization. It focuses on employees 
as well as patrons. Anyone who reads this book can understand the importance of having a 
trauma-informed approach and treating people with empathy. It reframes the question, “What 
is wrong with them?” to “What happened to them?” Tolley ties in theories, evidence, medical 
and social work concepts into her analysis. With fewer than 200 pages, this book is packed 
with facts, strategies, and rationale for readers to digest. Tolley is a professor and librarian 
at East Tennessee State University and brings ample experience and expertise to this topic.

This book will be useful for novices as well as long-time library practitioners. The book is 
broken into three parts in addition to a preface, acknowledgment, table of contents, appendix, 
references, and index. Part I explains how physical trauma and adverse childhood experiences